COLUMBUS, Ohio — It’s hard to travel in the Buckeye state without seeing the scarlet and gray of The Ohio State University.
On ball caps. License plates. T-shirts.
Nearly everywhere you look in Ohio, OSU’s presence is felt.
The arboretum where I completed a run and the golf course where I played a round last week in northeastern Ohio proudly displayed OSU flags and signage, while the pizza joint right outside my hotel in downtown Columbus is named OH Pizza and Brew — the OH presumably the first half of the famous Buckeye chant: OH-IO.
Ohio State — and its National Championship football team — remains the pride of Ohio. That was the case when I was growing up in Ohio 40 years ago — my dad even put the OSU fight song on the air horn of the family motor home — and it remains true to this day.
But there is one place where the Buckeye nation is not quite as strong as its 300-pound offensive linemen: fostering startups.
The Ohio State University is a powerhouse, with more than 58,000 students stretched across 15 colleges. From July 2013 to July 2014, the university’s researchers, faculty and students attracted 4,974 research awards from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense and NASA, totaling $497 million.
Even so, the University has not kept pace with many of its peers across the country — and in the Big 10 — when it comes to spinning off some of that research into viable new companies.
There’s no Google — famously started within the halls of Stanford University by PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin — in Columbus.
“We have all had our high hopes of Ohio State contributing at a greater level,” said Brian Zuercher, a Columbus entrepreneur who previously worked alongside the commercialization department to try to spark more startup activity.
The university has gone through various fits and starts over the years in trying to make commercialization a priority, but nothing has firmly taken root.
“Ohio State has one of the top research budgets of any university in the country, and they have one of the worst outcomes in terms of commercialization,” said Zuercher, adding that he’d like to see OSU professors and researchers help create a bigger tech ecosystem in Columbus. “It just doesn’t happen, for all of the many bureaucratic reasons.”
Despite its massive size, alumni network and research prowess — OSU ranks 19th in terms of R&D expenditures per student according to BestColleges.com — it still does not come anywhere close to joining the top universities in terms of graduates raising venture capital, according to data compiled by Max Woolf. (Even more disheartening for Buckeye fans, The University of Michigan ranks relatively high in this regard as the accompanying chart from Woolf indicates).
Tim Feran, a longtime business reporter at The Columbus Dispatch, said many smaller universities in the Midwest were simply “cleaning the clocks” of OSU when it came to commercialization efforts. Those schools made a ton of money in recent years as new technologies were spun off into separate companies or research was licensed to other entities.
OSU, meanwhile, missed the bus.
The sheer size of Ohio State actually served as a detriment, with Feran noting communication bottlenecks and turf wars between departments.
“There was a certain institutional inertia,” said Feran. “Ohio State is so frickin’ huge and people do tend to get siloed off. It is like being in a speed boat versus an ocean liner. You can’t turn on a dime.”
But OSU — under the direction of newly-appointed president Michael Drake — is trying to right the ship. Shortly after being named president last July, Drake acknowledged OSU’s weaknesses in the commercialization area, telling Columbus Business First that the university was “in the business of new knowledge and great ideas.”
It is not an easy transition, and it is too early to start counting successes from the relaunched commercialization program, which really started taking root about two years ago with direct involvement from the Fisher College of Business and other parts of the university.
“You just have to wait and see,” said Feran. “We are now just in the first full bloom.”
Strides are being made. The Technology Commercialization Office said that the university had more the 300 new inventions created in fiscal year 2014, and over the past two years OSU received more than 350 patents and filed for more than 700 patent applications. There are more than 40 startup companies in the OSU portfolio, with many of them receiving additional funds through state programs or working with economic development efforts such as Rev1 Ventures, Columbus2020 and BioOhio.
“There is tremendous momentum regarding licensing deals and Ohio State company formation,” said Stan Micek who is serving as the interim Vice President of the Technology Commercialization Office. Micek cited companies such as wireless charging upstart Nikola Labs, automotive startup Simple-Fill and healthcare analytics company Signet Accel Management which are using technologies from the university.
Students too note a changing attitude at OSU, which is lending more of a helping hand to would-be entrepreneurs.
“The doors were open,” said Eileen Guan, a senior business major at OSU who is working on two startup projects, including a mobile app that just took second place at a university startup competition last month. On the day I met Guan at Columbus Startup Week, she was heading to OSU’s school of law to participate in a free entrepreneurial clinic.
Guan, a member of the New Path technology entrepreneurship club at OSU, said programs like the free legal advice clinic represent one example of how the university helps student entrepreneurs. “Ohio State is feeding into this startup culture in Columbus,” said the 21-year-old Guan. “It is fostering really smart kids with a lot of ambition and drive.”
Eventually, dollars could flow to projects like the ones Guan and other students are developing.
Last fall, the university established the Accelerator Awards — grants designed to fund early-stage technologies that have promise of commercialization. OSU also created the The Technology Concept Fund and the Catalyst Fund V, both of which are designed to pump dollars into Ohio State innovations at the early stages when entrepreneurs are just trying to validate concepts.
When it comes to commercialization efforts, Micek said that Ohio State sometimes gets unfairly compared to its counterparts in the Big Ten.
“It is important to note that many of the Big Ten university commercialization leaders were propelled to the top of the list by one major commercialization success—in many cases it was the commercialization of a single drug,” he said. “Historically, Ohio State has put emphasis in other areas of the university when seeking innovations to commercialize. Only within the past two years, since the inception of the Drug Development Institute, has Ohio State experienced any wins in the drug arena.”
According to Micek, there are other big deals in the works in the life sciences arena, as well as through other research efforts at the University.
“The global Buckeye community is just now starting to see the positive effects of connecting with industry and capitalizing on Ohio State innovations,” Micek said. “By remaining vigilant and continuing to place priority on connecting research with industry opportunity, Ohio State will capitalize on the work of some of the globe’s best and brightest minds.”
Those minds are everywhere at OSU, and you can see a sampling of them at The Ohio State University’s Technology Commercialization Office — located on a prominent corner just off High Street on the southeastern edge of campus. Dozens of OSU inventors are prominently displayed on the wall — people who are working on advances in medicine, energy, clean tech and other technologies.
There’s no shortage of brilliant researchers and students walking around Columbus. The question for OSU, as well as many research universities, is how the ideas get out of the lab and into the hands of everyday people.
